September 17, 2012

Yahoo’s Mayer Offers Full-time Employees A Free iPhone 5

Both Apple and AT&T today announced record-breaking sales numbers for the next Apple smartphone, iPhone 5. AT&T said first day iPhone 5 pre-orders had beaten that of any other iPhone to date (they sold 200,000 in 24 hours last year), while Apple is once again saying they´re “completely blown away by the customer response” as they´ve announced they sold more than 2 million phones during the first 24 hours of availability.

Just one day after Apple managed to move 2 million pre-orders, Yahoo´s new CEO sent out an email to each full-time employee promising them new iPhone 5s, or options from HTC, Nokia or Samsung, if they so choose.

In a new program called “Yahoo! Smart Phones, Smart Fun!” Mayer and Yahoo will offer their employees the option of several market-leading phones, including the brand new iPhone 5, the HTC EVO 4G LTE, the HTC One X, Nokia Lumia 920 or Samsung Galaxy S III.

It had been reported only weeks ago that Yahoo´s newest CEO could be implementing such a program at the struggling Internet company.

“Ideally, we´d like our employees to have devices similar to our users, so we can think and work as the majority of our users do,” reads the memo which introduced this program.

In addition to playing her best Oprah, handing out free phones to each and every full-time employee, Mayer has also said her company will “provide monthly plans for data and phone.”

Noticeably absent from this list– though not absent from the memo– is RIM´s BlackBerry.

In the second sentence of the announcement memo, Yahoo announced they would be “moving off of BlackBerries” as their corporate phones.

Once a staple in the corporate world, RIM has seen a steady and gruesome decline from top of the pack to bottom of barrel. In a recent and telling story, one analyst´s research “found a meaningful number of carrier retail locations which had not sold a single BlackBerry in over a month.” This move doesn´t only add Yahoo to the long list of corporate customers who have left the BlackBerry platform, it can also be seen as even further proof of RIM´s demise.

Just as this news is bad for a Canadian RIM, it´s likely to be encouraging for Finnish Nokia, a company which once battled RIM for mobile dominance in the days before iPhone. Though they´ve also seen their share of struggles lately, including layoffs and shrinking marketshare, they´ve partnered with Windows Phone and are making efforts to remain relevant to today´s market with offerings such as the Lumia 920.

In an attempt to get their announcement out before Apple´s latest iPhone announcement, Nokia seemingly rushed to show off their latest Lumia to a waiting press. While pointing out the benefits of their PureView camera technology and optical image stabilization features, tech blog The Verge happened to discover that the videos Nokia claimed were shot with the new Lumia 920 were actually shot by a camera crew in a roving white van.

Nokia soon admitted to faking the videos when it was further discovered that the Finnish company had also hired a professional team of photographers to shoot the stills used in the product promos. These photographers used gear other than the Lumia 920 to snap these shots.

The iPhone 5 is due out this Friday, the Lumia 920 could arrive this October, and the other Android phones available to Yahoo employees are currently available. According to the memo, Yahoo is already taking orders for these new phones.